Out to Lunch

Getting Astrophysical

Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of the world’s most technologically advanced space theater—the Hayden Planetarium, at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York—is the man People magazine voted “Sexiest Astrophysicist Alive.” It’s an unusual claim to fame, for he could not have had too much competition in his field. Then again, in 2007, Time magazine named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.

This provocative and amusing man is among a rare breed nowadays—a public intellectual popularizing science. With his frequent appearances on The Daily Show and The Colbert Report, as well as his books—the latest one, Space Chronicles: Facing the Ultimate Frontier, published this month by W. W. Norton—the 53-year-old, Harvard-educated Dr. Tyson is consciously building even more bridges between high and popular culture than Carl Sagan did.

“Many academicians don’t even own a television, much less watch one,” he mentioned over lunch in his cluttered office, which looked so disorganized it might have belonged to an unworldly college grad.

I put his knowledge of TV to a little test. “Have you seen Jersey Shore?” I asked.

“Yes, though not as a devoted follower,” he replied.

“Nevertheless, you realize that Snooki is an extraterrestrial?”

“Well, that I did not know! It’s an interesting notion. But I would ask what evidence supports this, other than her testimony.”

The Snooki paradigm is the identical, strictly objective test Dr. Tyson uses for people who claim to have seen flying saucers. “Bring me the physical evidence! Show me a piece of a flying saucer!”

“I got lemonade too,” he said, carrying our lunch trays into his office from the museum cafeteria. “Who doesn’t like lemonade?” There was pea soup and a grilled-cheese sandwich for him, sushi and salad for me.

“When flying saucers land on Earth in sci-fi movies,” I asked, “why do the aliens always exit down a ramp?”

“The flying saucers are handicapped-accessible,” he replied with a straight face.

Dr. Tyson is a paradox of persuasive rationalist and romantic Space Age dreamer. The mystery and ultimate wonder of the universe has awed him since he was a child, raised in the Bronx and obsessed with studying astronomy. No one has ever seen an alien, he agreed, yet he remains confident that intelligent extraterrestrial life exists.

“The universe is almost 14 billion years old,” he explained, “and, wow! Life had no problem starting here on Earth! I think it would be inexcusably egocentric of us to suggest that we’re alone in the universe.”

Stephen Hawking imagines aliens will be malevolent, while Carl Sagan thought they would be friendly, like E.T. “Which is it to be?” I asked.

“I have a third view. The alien is neither evil or kind. What if he’s just much smarter than us? The closest animal to us is of course the chimp. There’s a trifling difference in our DNA of less than 2 percent. The urge is to say what a difference that makes. But take a different tack: We know that the smartest chimps are able to accomplish what our toddlers can do. So imagine there’s another life-form on Earth, or aliens, that are 2 percent beyond us in intelligence. It would mean their alien toddlers can do what the smartest of us can do. They would see the Hubble telescope as a quaint little exercise they do in their shop class in first grade!”

“If they’re so clever, why don’t they invade Earth and conquer us?”

“In this scenario, they could enslave us and we wouldn’t even know it. But I wonder whether we’re simply uninteresting to them—as uninteresting as a colony of worms you walk past on the street.”

“What if we were able to communicate with them?”

“If we can’t have a meaningful conversation with a chimp that has 98 percent identical DNA, the audacity of us to assert that we could have a meaningful conversation with another life-form that’s smarter than us!”

I was beginning to think of Dr. Tyson himself as the alien he had in mind, quite friendly though he was. Then I asked about his hunch that an asteroid could wipe us all out one fine, beautiful day.

“It’s almost certain,” he replied as if forecasting rain. “But we don’t know when it will happen. The catalogue of all the asteroids we’re at risk of being hit by is incomplete right now.”

“Great,” I said.

“No, no, the space program can deflect the asteroid,” he reassured me. “We know enough about the laws of gravity and trajectories of space objects to deflect it. There’s an asteroid the size of the Rose Bowl that’s going to give us a buzz cut in 2029 on April 13. Which is a Friday, by the way. It will come close, but it won’t hit us.”

“You’re certain about this?”

“The laws of physics enable us to predict the future—an eclipse, what time the sun will rise, or what time darkness descends. I don’t wield special knowledge. Physics is the only profession in which prophecy is not only accurate but routine.”

I was meeting Dr. Tyson shortly after the Space Shuttle program had been stopped—the end of the boundless frontier, I argued, and with it the re-invigorated possibility of the American imagination.

“The problem isn’t the end of the shuttle era,” he said. “It’s the absence of another spacecraft on an adjacent launchpad ready to fly.”

But where’s the political will to make that happen? He suggested that a space war with China to build a military station on Mars, for example, would surely seal the deal.

“During the Cold War with Russia, in the 1960s America of Cape Canaveral, the Zeitgeist of the nation changed,” Dr. Tyson added on a passionate note. “We embraced curiosity and discovery. I submit that in the 21st century the leading nations of the world will be those who embrace active investments in science and technology. If our own economic health is a priority, we need to fully fund NASA’s missions to the frontiers of space. The very phrase ‘Space Age’ means future. It doesn’t mean the past.”